NEWARK — Several Elizabeth firefighters are frantically trying to reach the victim trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft in the damp and smoky ruins of "Metro City" light rail station.

Under the dim beam of a flashlight the size of a car battery, the crew drives a water-cooled saw powered by hydraulic fluid through a slab of concrete and rebar, sending sparks flying. All around them are the ruins of the "Orange Street Subway Station," where a 10-inch gas main ruptured hours earlier — collapsing a parking garage into the train stop and trapping 32 people.

"I want to quell any rumors immediately that this was anything but an industrial accident," Metro City Mayor Cory Booker, the fictional counterpart to the Newark mayor, said in an 8:30 a.m. press briefing. "This is not — I repeat, this is not — a terrorist attack."

Actually, it’s a simulation being held this week at the Newark Fire Academy: An as-real-as-fake-gets exercise for those Elizabeth firefighters and the nearly 400 other members of the Metro Urban Search and Rescue Strike Team, a task force charged with responding to major disasters in North Jersey and beyond.

The team, formed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, includes members of 10 fire departments from Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic and Union counties, as well as members of the Port Authority Police Department.

The mandatory exercise is held every year, for the last four in Newark.

"We just took the ball and rolled with it," said Art Mauriello, the Newark Fire Department’s battalion chief for special operations. "We’ve created it. We’ve designed it. We’ve built it. And we run it."

It took about five months to conceive and build this year’s scenario. It’s an impressive mock-up of what a destroyed subway station would look and sound like, complete with a bus converted into a light rail car and a stretch of train tracks. Mangled and crushed cars protrude from beneath piles of concrete, dirt and crushed stone, with victims (mannequins) still inside. Fog machines pump in smoke and speakers blare the sound of car alarms and breaking glass.

It proved for an intense drill. That was the case for the Elizabeth firefighters trying to free the victim trapped in the elevator shaft — one of numerous tasks teams were assigned to. It was a race against time, but eventually, the saw broke pieces off enough concrete. The rescuers wrapped the victim in padding and strapped him to a backboard. He was lifted up and out of the shaft, over piles of rubble and taken to a triage center.